Bangladesh population: Asset or liability?
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Enayet Rasul Bhuiyan
The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohammad, has commented that overpopulation is not a burden, rather it can be turned into an asset for a country if the people are provided with proper education, training and become resourceful in different respects. " Bangladesh could turn its 162 million population into assets, '' he said as the chief guest at a programme held on the occasion of exhibition of Bangladeshi exportable items, 'Showcase Bangladesh', in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.
No one with some knowledge of developmental issues will likely disagree with Mahathir's views of making Bangladesh's population as a source of its strength when it is seen as rather a source of weakness at the moment. For the person who presided over the transformation of his country from a poor and developing one into semi-developed status over two and a half decades, knows it best from his experience that the way to sustainable development lies in building up an appropriately trained workforce to that end.
Malaysia now is a leading economic power in the world, specially in the Asian region. But its conditions of overpopulation, hunger and squalor were not much dissimilar from Bangladesh in the sixties. This writer remembers that students from that country used to come to erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to take admission in the Bangladesh Institute of Engineering and Technology (BUET) as it was then regionally and globally considered as an academic centre of excellence. Now, it is the other way around with Bangladeshi students aspiring to study in one of the many world class centres of higher learning in different disciplines in Malaysia.
This example can be one of many to show how Bangladesh has remained static or progressed little in the last forty years when other nations with a similar level of development in the early seventies, adopted and implemented policies with a vision to turn their population into productive and skilled manpower to far outpace Bangladesh in their quest for development and prosperity.
Indeed, there are two ways of looking at Bangladesh in its present context: one view is that it is destined to a hopeless future burdened with a gigantic population that is still growing at a brisk pace. The other view is optimistic that finds Bangladesh to be a big market already, far bigger than many countries by comparison, with prospects of this market size to become bigger and bigger in the future. Out of its 162 million people, some 60 per cent or over 97 million are considered to have an existence above the internationally defined poverty line. Even a number of important European Union (EU) countries do not have a combined market size of 97 million which should give an idea of the present business opportunities in Bangladesh or the reasons why international telecommunication giants and other consumer goods producers are so keen to expand their activities in Bangladesh. Bangladesh's economy has been growing above 5 per cent steadily for the last decade and seems poised to grow even higher in the near future. Goldman Sachs, the internationally famed investment banking and securities firm, has identified Bangladesh as one of 11 countries with fast growth and market prospects. From estimation of gross domestic product (GDP), Bangladesh was ranked 58th among some 180 countries sampled by major donor institutions. Similar studies conducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the World Bank (WB) found Bangladesh in a higher position of 37th and 38th respectively. Thus, the description of Bangladesh as a too poor and too impoverished country is a very exaggerated one and should not in all fairness apply to it.
Bangladesh's population was some 75 million in 1971 when some 60 per cent or 45 million of its people lived below the poverty line. Today, it has some 162 million people with some 40 per cent or 64 million people under the poverty line with the rest 98 million people above the poverty line. This means that the population of Bangladesh has more than doubled in the last 40 years but despite this doubling of the population the number of the ones out of poverty have also doubled and the total number still in poverty have shrunk significantly taking into account that the population more than doubled in this period. Besides, chronic hunger or suffering from food shortage was a feature for the preponderant number in the population in the seventies. Today, even the poor in Bangladesh are reasonably fed every day and feel free from famine conditions except for a few pockets of distressed people in the northern districts.
The above are huge successes indeed and shows that Bangladesh has not gone down the chute as per the Malthusian dictum of overpopulation. Notwithstanding its population pressure, its economic conditions and the state of being of its people on the whole, keep on improving. The challenge is to only maintain this momentum and further much improve this pace of betterment at the fastest. And for this purpose, this government and the governments that will follow must be resolved from now on to fully implement truly visionary policies to turn the country's population increasingly into able, educated, skilled and trained manpower. The government needs to take up on its own much greater or expanded programmes to disseminate technical, vocational or need-based education and training for progressively making human resources out of the greatest number in the population. It should also put greater stress in its policies to give stimulus to private sector efforts in the same direction.
So far, Bangladeshis on their own have defeated the doomsday theories of overpopulation by mainly their own efforts and helped scantily by governmental policies. But this has been a haphazard process lacking systematic and planned endeavour. There can be no substitute to government accelerating the process through its well-conceived and sustained activities on a large scale to create human resources adequately for the longer term sustainable well-being of the country.
The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohammad, has commented that overpopulation is not a burden, rather it can be turned into an asset for a country if the people are provided with proper education, training and become resourceful in different respects. " Bangladesh could turn its 162 million population into assets, '' he said as the chief guest at a programme held on the occasion of exhibition of Bangladeshi exportable items, 'Showcase Bangladesh', in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.
No one with some knowledge of developmental issues will likely disagree with Mahathir's views of making Bangladesh's population as a source of its strength when it is seen as rather a source of weakness at the moment. For the person who presided over the transformation of his country from a poor and developing one into semi-developed status over two and a half decades, knows it best from his experience that the way to sustainable development lies in building up an appropriately trained workforce to that end.
Malaysia now is a leading economic power in the world, specially in the Asian region. But its conditions of overpopulation, hunger and squalor were not much dissimilar from Bangladesh in the sixties. This writer remembers that students from that country used to come to erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to take admission in the Bangladesh Institute of Engineering and Technology (BUET) as it was then regionally and globally considered as an academic centre of excellence. Now, it is the other way around with Bangladeshi students aspiring to study in one of the many world class centres of higher learning in different disciplines in Malaysia.
This example can be one of many to show how Bangladesh has remained static or progressed little in the last forty years when other nations with a similar level of development in the early seventies, adopted and implemented policies with a vision to turn their population into productive and skilled manpower to far outpace Bangladesh in their quest for development and prosperity.
Indeed, there are two ways of looking at Bangladesh in its present context: one view is that it is destined to a hopeless future burdened with a gigantic population that is still growing at a brisk pace. The other view is optimistic that finds Bangladesh to be a big market already, far bigger than many countries by comparison, with prospects of this market size to become bigger and bigger in the future. Out of its 162 million people, some 60 per cent or over 97 million are considered to have an existence above the internationally defined poverty line. Even a number of important European Union (EU) countries do not have a combined market size of 97 million which should give an idea of the present business opportunities in Bangladesh or the reasons why international telecommunication giants and other consumer goods producers are so keen to expand their activities in Bangladesh. Bangladesh's economy has been growing above 5 per cent steadily for the last decade and seems poised to grow even higher in the near future. Goldman Sachs, the internationally famed investment banking and securities firm, has identified Bangladesh as one of 11 countries with fast growth and market prospects. From estimation of gross domestic product (GDP), Bangladesh was ranked 58th among some 180 countries sampled by major donor institutions. Similar studies conducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the World Bank (WB) found Bangladesh in a higher position of 37th and 38th respectively. Thus, the description of Bangladesh as a too poor and too impoverished country is a very exaggerated one and should not in all fairness apply to it.
Bangladesh's population was some 75 million in 1971 when some 60 per cent or 45 million of its people lived below the poverty line. Today, it has some 162 million people with some 40 per cent or 64 million people under the poverty line with the rest 98 million people above the poverty line. This means that the population of Bangladesh has more than doubled in the last 40 years but despite this doubling of the population the number of the ones out of poverty have also doubled and the total number still in poverty have shrunk significantly taking into account that the population more than doubled in this period. Besides, chronic hunger or suffering from food shortage was a feature for the preponderant number in the population in the seventies. Today, even the poor in Bangladesh are reasonably fed every day and feel free from famine conditions except for a few pockets of distressed people in the northern districts.
The above are huge successes indeed and shows that Bangladesh has not gone down the chute as per the Malthusian dictum of overpopulation. Notwithstanding its population pressure, its economic conditions and the state of being of its people on the whole, keep on improving. The challenge is to only maintain this momentum and further much improve this pace of betterment at the fastest. And for this purpose, this government and the governments that will follow must be resolved from now on to fully implement truly visionary policies to turn the country's population increasingly into able, educated, skilled and trained manpower. The government needs to take up on its own much greater or expanded programmes to disseminate technical, vocational or need-based education and training for progressively making human resources out of the greatest number in the population. It should also put greater stress in its policies to give stimulus to private sector efforts in the same direction.
So far, Bangladeshis on their own have defeated the doomsday theories of overpopulation by mainly their own efforts and helped scantily by governmental policies. But this has been a haphazard process lacking systematic and planned endeavour. There can be no substitute to government accelerating the process through its well-conceived and sustained activities on a large scale to create human resources adequately for the longer term sustainable well-being of the country.